All of reality is in a person. He thinks that he exists and that besides him there is a huge universe, but this picture is depicted only in his shattered vessel.

Once there was one vessel and in it a person felt one world, one reality, himself, and nothing but that. The Creator, which means the force that revives him, was also inside him. On the outside there was nothing and there was no such concept as “outside myself.” This is the correct perception, which we call “Malchut of Ein Sof (Infinity)”; everything is inside me and nothing is divided by boundaries, there is no boundary, it is infinite.

Then the vessel was broken into two parts. Now in order to attain Ein Sof and to acquire the true, deep perception of the upper dimension, there is only one thing we can do—go through infinite states of preparation, which is what we are doing now.

The world of Ein Sof divided into two parts: “I” and “outside myself,” and all my work is in connecting the two parts. This is why there is the condition of “love thy friend as thyself,” which I have to keep so that I will attach the external part to the internal part that I naturally feel as mine. If I could do that, I would return to Ein Sof.

Loving what is outside myself just as I love myself egoistically means to bestow, and that is the love of others. These words confuse us, but in fact it is about understanding that just as I love myself, I should understand that everything outside me is mine. It only seems to me that the still, vegetative, and animate levels of nature and also people exist on the outside. I even discover the upper force internally, as it says, “You shall not have a foreign God.” Everything is inside me.

Baal HaSulam explains this in the “Preface to the Book of Zohar,” saying that there is a kind of “camera” in our consciousness, which depicts the outside world to us. This means that some of my desires are the inner feeling of my “self” that is divided into the “root,” “soul” and “body,” while the other part is the external picture that is divided into a “garment” and “temple.” According to another terminology, I divide myself into “mind,” “bones,” “tendons,” “flesh”, and “skin” and the external world into the still, vegetative, animate, and speaking nature.

There are different sayings regarding the perception of reality used by Kabbalists, such as: “Don’t do onto others what is hated by you,” “Love thy friend as thyself,” “unite in a group,” “you have whom to unite with,” “help them and they will help you,” since eventually it helps a person acquire the right attitude and to return to what he was before the shattering of the vessels. There, there are no “I” and “others”; there this whole world disappears; there we don’t feel the bodies, but only parts of the individual souls that connect more closely until they merge into one soul.

Baal HaSulam explains that in fact there is only one soul, which means the world of Ein Sof, one desire that is full of one force. It is the only thing that exists.

But by our exertion and by attainting this perception, we begin to feel what is happening in the world of Ein Sof in depth; we attain all its ten Sefirot with all the Lights of NRNHY. After attaining the initial state of a created being, through the second state, through the shattering, we arrive at a third state. Then we attain the root and all of reality and become like it, understanding and feeling like it, equal to it in every way.

Actually the point isn’t even in the equality; there are no words in our language to express this state. We are simply in it: There is no “I” that attains “Him,” that is somewhere on the outside. I am Him. This is called adhesion.
[89098]
From the Convention of Unity, Day Two 9/21/12, Lesson 4 

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